Sudden drop in SE traffic?

Here’s a good article on what to do when your search engine traffic suddenly drops off after your site’s been ranked well: nothing. That’s the answer - nothing.

In fact, this site, experienced that back towards the end of September. The Google traffic basically dropped off to a small fraction of what it was in the past. What did I do? Well, nothing - I did nothing at all. And sure enough, traffic came back in less then a month (I believe).

I think too many of us panic the instant we see the SE rankings change, thinking we’ve done something wrong, or there’s something new everyone else is doing and we’re behind. If you have built a site that gets a good response from visitors, you should be getting a good response from the SE’s. And if you have gotten a good response in the past from the SE’s, you will again. But the fact is, sometimes your rankings get strange. It’s annoying, it’s not particularly fair, and it could be scary if your whole livelihood depends on your site (which is why it’s good to have more than one site making money). But you have to remember, this is free traffic - the SE’s obligation is to searchers, not people who want their sites to rank. In my (limited) experience, these glitches do sort themselves out.

Other’s suggested that during the down period, it is a good time to do some double checking of the basics. Examples they offered include; “move a bunch of sites to dedicated IPs, checked/tested that all sites had a 301 from domain.com to www.domain.com, checked reverse DNS, and added a timestamp to the pages.”

These are harmless to try, because they’re not really changing your site. Just basic good maintenance.